A New Addition to the Family

My host mother is a 69 year old woman with diabetes and is the primary care giver for her grown children and grand children. She cooks all the meals every day for every member in her family, even those who no longer live in the house. She alone is responsible for maintaining a spotless house and doing all the laundry by hand for every one. It is an around the clock job that is very physically demanding and she is starting to get to the age where she needs some help. Instead of the husband or the live in sons lending a hand, my host mom has been talking about getting some hired help. The only problem she claims, is that it's hard to find good help these days. Meaning, you have to know and trust a person before you let them into your house. The past two helpers my host mom has had, allegedly stole. So she is constantly on the look out for a woman to help relieve some of the burden of cooking and cleaning.

One morning at the beginning of this week, I went down stairs for breakfast and there was a young lady standing in the kitchen. There are always friends and random family members in the house so I wasn't surprised. But as I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my breakfast of bread and avocado, I realized my host mom was explaining the preparation step by step. It became apparent that my host mom was training this girl to help around the house. I studied her face hard trying to get a guestimate on her age. She looked young and I was praying that she be at least 16 (16 is the age they graduate high school).

I struck up a conversation with her and asked how old she was. She was 12. I got a knot in the bottom of my stomach. Child labor is still very common in Peru and is something I am very opposed to. I did not know if I could live in a house that had a 12 year old scrubbing the bathroom and making my lunch. As we continued to talk, I learned that she had moved with her family from Ayacucho (a poor province up in the Andes) to Lurin two years ago. But because there were so many children in the family and her older sister was pregnant and the dad had left to find work, this girl was being neglected. An arrangement had been made that she, Sara, would move into our house and be fed and cared for in exchange for work.

I spent the rest of the day thinking about my values and if this situation was crossing one of my moral lines. In one aspect, our family was being kind and taking in a needy girl in the family, which is a beautiful act of kindness. But to what degree was she going to be made to work? Was she attending school and how much of a priority would her school work be?

The next morning I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and Sara was cleaning the shower. I was really hating the situation. I worked all day that day and was tutoring until 10 at night. When I came home finally, my 34 year host brother was sitting at the table helping her with her homework. It was a bit of a relief to see the family supporting her school work. I ended up getting in on the study group as we attempted to tackle one of those ridiculous and impossibly hard junior high school assignments. We had to find words that ended with different letter combinations and I challenge any of you to find 5 Spanish words that end in B-L-U.

My host mom has also really embraced Sara. She loves having some one to talk with and adore her. It's also very surprising how happy Sara seems. She is a very sweet girl who always smiles and didn't need any transition time. She likes that I live there and that she is not the odd one out in the family. She is really beloved by all after just one week and I have dealt with the idea of her working around the house. In my old host family, there was 12 year old and a 15 year old. Both the girls helped around the house, cooking and cleaning. It's only natural to help out with chores. As long as she is not treated poorly and her studies stay a priority, I view this as a win win situation

Embassy Games Pics

Since you are not allowed to take private cameras into the US embassy, these are the only pictures I have to post. This is a picture with a scattering of Peace Corps girls with the US Ambassodor and the woman in charge of the Embassy games. This is not the volleyball team mind you, we are excepting the award for girls soccer.
This is the Peace Volley ball team +some of our cheering crowd proudly posing with all our trophies we won in the tournament. You can see even the kid has on his Peace Corps shirt. I can't wait till next year!

With Every Season, Turn, Turn, Turn

I was beginning to feel like Peruvian Autumn was really more like spring time in California. In April, we had cool mornings and evenings along with sunny, warm days. Because of Peru’s close location to the equator, we don’t experience seasonal changes like those in the US. For starters, the length of day never changes, not noticeably anyway. Whether it’s July or January, it will be dark by 6:30, give or take 10 minutes. Its tropical climate also doesn’t cause a dramatic change in the foods that are eaten. Unlike the states, seasonal foods such as asparagus, squashes and oranges, are available year round and are always fresh and locally grown.

Walking into the produce department of any supermarket in the US, it might not even occur to a person which foods are in and out of season. What this person might not realize is that the grapes she is buying in December are from the southern hemisphere. Americans are used to getting anything they want, whenever they want it. Bananas, for example, are a year round staple for many Americans. A month without bananas is unfathomable to some. But bananas do not grow anywhere on the continental US and must be shipped in.

Peru has a very different food mentality. You eat what is local and when it is in season. Luckily for us, because of its diverse climates, Peru offers an amazing assortment of local produce year round. I consider myself quite lucky for getting posted in a Peace Corps country with this kind of variety. Many PCV`s world wide are not as fortunate. The average Peruvian doesn’t have the money to buy food that is imported from all around the world and out of season. There are some things they don’t grow in Peru and therefore miss out on. Berries would be one of the biggest things I miss. But as I’ve mentioned before, the list of fruit you can get in Peru that you can’t get in the US, trumps the reverse. And at least bananas are always, ALWAYS in season, and local. I walk past banana trees on my way to work everyday. In fact, I walk past banana trees, potatoes and broccoli, all growing side by side. This country is really unique in some aspects.

I was really starting to get used to this timeless, seasonless place where there are always fresh to greens and amazing tomatoes, as if it were always summer. Then yesterday morning I woke up and came face to face with reality. In Peru, there aren’t really 4 seasons so much as 2. In the mountains, they have rainy season and dry season. In Lima, they have the sunny season.....and the gray. Coincidentally, the mountain and the desert seasons are inversed. While the facebook status messages from all the people living in the mountains are praising the end of the rainy season and the on set of beautiful weather, I am cursing the cloudy heavens "it’s not time, I’m not ready. Please, just one more month!!!!". But alas, instead of the gradual change of seasons inching in and out, I went to bed on a summery sunday night and woke up to winter.

This may seem like an over-dramatization, but as I was recounting my disbelief of the overnight seasonal change to a PCV in northern Peru, she said that the exact same thing happened to her on the same sunday night. I look back at my first three months when I arrived at site and remember them being cold, dark and lonely, and I’m not even talking about the weather. The Lima gray just reflected the way I felt inside. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that my spirits and life all seemed to improve with the weather. I cannot believe the clouds have come back so quickly. By my count, we only had 4 months of sun. Looking ahead to 8 months of gray skies, especially with what I associate them with, gives me an unsettled feeling.

But at the same time, I cannot stop aching for the coldest months to arrive. Very cunningly, I planned my biggest escapes and best vacations for the dead of winter. The unsettled feeling that pours over me is quickly washed away when I think that in just one months time, my parents will arrive and we’ll be off to Machu Picchu (up in the sierra where the weather is inversely sunny). Then in July I will go to the northern part of Peru to run my marathon, which I hope will be some where between cool and warm weather. At the end of July I have free vacation for the Peruvian Independence Day and escape from Lima yet again.

August is shaping up to be my most eventful month yet. Right after my independence day vacation, my friend Amanda will be coming to Lima for a few days with some med school friends before they hit up Machu Picchu. Then All of Peru 9 will be coming into Lima for our one year medical checks. After this week of having all my friends in town, I fly home to the states for 2 weeks.

My poor friends are receiving relentless emails about how excited I am and all the things I want to do with them when I get home. Thinking about California in August is the only way I can get a warm smile on my face after looking up at the gray sky here. So to all my friends who are being bombarded with a ton of over zealous emails, I’m sorry. But I beg that you humor me and all my warm weather fantasies. I’m sure as the departure date draws nearer, I’ll not only submit my friends through private emails to the trivial things I am obsessing about going home, and start annoying my blog readers with all the things I want to do in the very short 2 weeks I’ll be home.

Old Habbits Die Hard

This weekend was another intense sporting weekend comparable to those of my teen years. Friday morning I ran 15 miles for my marathon training. Friday night I had volleyball practice followed by a volleyball tournament on Saturday. This sporting combination in one weekend was once considered lethal, at least to some of my coaches. When I was a freshman in high school, I chose a club volleyball tournament over a high school track meet and my track coach called me the morning of and told me if I didn't get to the meet, I was off the team. I can't remember if that was Mr. Jones of Mr. Miles who made me to collapse into tears that morning cause I knew I would never get to the meet on time. I was terrified I would be kicked off the team and still look back at that phone call as completely as unnecessary and inappropriate.

But the scare tactic worked as track ended up wining out on my event calendar for the next 8 years. It is nice to not have sports ruling my life anymore. In college every quarter, I had to schedule all of my classes around a three hour chunk of time in the afternoon for track practice. It killed my social life for indoor and outdoor season every year. There's a reason our conference track party was one of the most well known parties in the whole school. We worked so hard for so long that when it was finally over, we went absolutely nuts (and got absolutely naked to run a mile relay).

Somehow, now that I'm free after years of sport slavery, I have voluntarily gone back to sacrificing nights out on the town for early morning runs and tournaments. Last night I went to a potluck dinner and everybody left to go out dancing. There was no way after 15 miles and all that volleyball, were my legs gonna dance till dawn. So instead I came home and skyped a few friends. I didn't have my phone numbers with me, so I ended up just calling friends who have their phone numbers posted on facebook. It was a random sample of friends because of that, but I couldn’t have been happier than to have talked to these people.

We ended up loosing both our volleyball games on saturday. We got 4th place over all in the tournament, but Peace Corps took home more trophies than any other department. Our assistant country director got first place in Tennis. Two other male staff members got first and second in the chess tournament and we won the girls soccer tournament. The teams we played in volleyball yesterday were really good. We played well in all of our games and if we had been able to practice together more as a team, we would have been a lot better. Regardless of loosing, I still had an amazing time and everybody is already buzzing about next year. I brought along some of my Lima friends this time to join the cheering ranks. They were really impressed with the size an the intensity of the tournament. It's nice to offer my Lima friends something on wow-scale. It's usually the other way around. I come to Lima as a poor Peace Corps Volunteer and they take me to some fancy country club or event which blows me and my life at site out of the water. I never get to take them any place cool and really wow them.

But they had never been the US embassy before and thought the day was really cool. Every one on the Peace Corps staff wanted to know who my friends were and how I had met them. By the end of the day, Peace Corps had signed up my friends to give microfinance talks to the incoming business training group and sit on a panel discussion at the up coming Close of Service conference.

Now that I am an adult and don't have to let coaches who believe the sun and moon rise for high school sports (don't even get me started on high school football), I am able to enjoy sports for what they are. Recreation. There are nights before runs that I have to sacrifice going out, but in turn I get to take my social life to my sports. I really think my Lima friends will remember the day they went to the volleyball tournament at the US embassy in Peru more than they would any random night going out and dancing. I know I will.

In my Defense

My mother was kind enough to point out in my last blog entry, that I used the word accountability where I should have used the word accounting. Now, I have never claimed to be a champion wordist. A proper handle on grammar and spelling of the English language has always seemed just out of my grasp.

But that is my excuse this time. It's English! My primary spoken language these days is Spanish. A lot of volunteers say the more Spanish they speak, the worse their English gets. I don't know if this is true of not. I think my comprehension of this romance language has actually helped me make sense of the English language. But I have found that I am increasingly forgetting English words and have had to stop and think about such common words like avocado and mattress.

My accountability/accounting mix up is just one example of how the languages in my head are running together and no matter which one I am speaking, it often comes out as spanglish. You see, the word accounting in Spanish is contablilidad. And I wrote the blog entry moments after I had come back from trying to help that old lady with her US taxes and racking my brain for accounting jargon in spanish.

I know my English isn't great, but cut me a break. I struggle enough with one language and here I am trying to juggle two. I think my writing errors just give my blog entries my unique personality: far from perfect but they try really really hard.

Volunteer or Doormat?

There is a fine line between being a volunteer and a doormat. For every volunteer that line is different, but we are responsible for setting our own boundaries for what we are willing to do to help others. Peru is a society that is used to hand outs and NGO’s. A lot of people are looking for some one to come and solve all their problems for them. So as PCV’s we spend a lot of time explaining our role in the community and the services we are willing and not willing to provide.

Things constantly come up and I have to decide what I am willing to do for others on a day to day basis. It doesn’t matter what type of volunteer you are: Youth, Small Business, Health, Environment, most volunteers are sought after to be one thing, an English teacher. Whether the teaching is formal or informal, Peruvians somehow expect you to teach them English overnight without having to put any real work in.

I draw my line here. I will offer to help kids with there English homework, but have successfully avoided teaching English in a classroom setting. By reading my blog you may notice that I don’t exactly have a master on my native tongue and therefore don't feel confident teaching grammar and spelling.
But the other night a friend in town asked me if I would be willing to help an old lady translate some forms she relieved in the mail. He said she needed to fill them out but didn’t understand any English. I figured this type of service didn’t fall on the doormat side of my boundary.
So this morning I went over to the old ladies house, who graciously sat me down at her kitchen table and brought me a stack of papers. There on the top of the stack was a 1040A US tax form. And beneath it was a whole mess of other tax forms and papers explaining how to do it. I couldn’t believed I was suckered into doing some old ladies taxes. She gave me her peruvian ID and pen and told me to start filling it out.
I explained to her that it wasn’t quite as simple. First off,
“what’s your social security number?” I asked her.
“My what?” she replied.
“tu numero de seguro social”
Along with all the sheets of paper she had handed me, where a whole bunch of translations for all the technical accounting terms and even translated proper names.
“okay, let’s back track. " I said "Why are you even filling this out anyways? Did you earn any kind of income from the United States in the past year?”
She said no, her husband did. But her husband was dead.
In the marital status column, there isn’t even a box to mark for widowed, filing for your deceased spouse. And instead of a W-2, there was some other form I had never seen before that was all in Spanish and contained the numbers necessary to fill out the 1040A. I shuffled through the papers reading the English and Spanish forms that explained how to manage everything.

I didn’t even fill out my own taxes this year. My dad wanted our family friend and accountant to do it seeing as things were a bit more complicated now that I’m living and earning my income abroad. And I’m pretty sure I’ve messed up my taxes every year I’ve ever done them on my own. Accountability is so not my thing. And the papers spread out on the table bewildered me. I tried to explain to her that I had no idea what to do and that she should call a professional. But she wasn’t’ haven’t that as an answer. She wanted me to figure it out right then and there and get her taxes done.

I did try to figure it out. And I think I could have if I worked on it for several hours and had access to the IRS website. But this was officially way past my boundary of things I was willing to do in the name international development. After a half hour of looking over documents I basically told her I couldn’t do it and was going to leave. She was not very happy with me and wanted to know to do then, if I couldn’t’ figure it out. I told her to call an accountant. or better yet, her son who lives in the states. So even though I thought I was doing a neighborly thing by translating a few documents for an old lady, I think I may have made more of an enemy than a friend. Out of all the things I imagined doing as a peace corps volunteer, filling out IRS tax forms was definitely not one of them.

Don't F*** with Peace Corps!

Of all the branches of the US foreign service, the Peace Corps doesn’t have the toughest or the coolest reputation. Every year, the US embassy in Peru has a sports tournament, and all the different departments of the embassy play each other. Every Saturday for 4 weeks, employees (and in my case volunteers) along with their family and friends go out to the sports field at the embassy and represent for their line of service.

I didn’t know this tournament existed until today. On Tuesday , I was in the office working on an in service training, and I was recruited. The fact that I had any volleyball experience at all, automatically made me a starting player. When I agreed to play, I had no idea what I was in for. I thought it would be a low intensity game where each teams biggest challenge would be just getting it over the net. I thought it would be so easy going, that I even though I had practice Friday night and games Saturday morning, I scheduled my 10 mile marathon training run at 7 in the morning before the tournament started.

Only a few people showed up to practice Friday night. We ended up playing two on two for the first hour and three on three for the second. Every one was pretty good, so that the two on two matches were really fun. But I forgot how exhausting they are. I am in good shape, but my body is so not used to the anaerobic, jumping and lateral movement that is volleyball. The next morning on my run, my legs were moving as if they were made out of stone. I was seriously regretting my decision to marathon train the morning of the tournament.

Within the US embassy there are a lot of different departments. Some are made up all US citizens and some are comprised of all Peruvian nationals. There was only one other volunteer playing on our Peace Corps team, and apart from us, we were the only Americans. Because of this, Ryan (6’3’’) and me (5’9’’) were the tallest people on the team. We’re both skinny and athletic, but not in anyway intimidating. Our team would best be described as scrappy. We even had the accountants mom playing with us. Don’t get me wrong, that 50 year old woman had a more banning body than most 20 year olds I know and was the best server on our team. But's that's what I mean when I say our team was scrappy.

As we headed over to the court, I saw a group of adults that all looked like they had been bred in bio chambers by the US government. I turned to one of the PC secretaries and said with fear behind my voice “that’s who we’re playing against??!!!”. She told me not to worry. Not to worry? Our first game was against the DEA. The Drug Enforcement Agency (all American, of course). You want a department that hasthe reputation as cool and tough? Look no further than the DEA. There were 4 men on their team and 2 women. The women, while clearly very fit and attractive, didn’t scare me. The 4 men on the other hand, were all 6’2’’ of taller and looked like they could bench press out entire team. There guys were BIG.

To make matters worse, we were playing with the net at women’s competition height. Much as I suspected, the DEA started womping the Peace Corps. The giant men would just stand at the net and smash anything we sent over. To make the best out of what seemed like a done deal, all of the loyal Peace Corps staff got on their feet and started cheering and chanting so loud, they drowned out the noise of the crowd watching the more popular soccer game. And while we were killed in the first round, we came back around to win the second. Wouldn’tcha know.

I 100% accredit our win to our cheering crowd. Pretty soon the enthusiasm spread and over half the crowd was cheering “Peace Corps, Peace Corps!”. But really, doesn't it just seem wrong to route against the Peace Corps? The Drug Enforcement officers seemed a bit frazzled by all this. There was this one really big black man, that for some reason always ended up guarding me at the net and vice versa. He was really into the game, and started to show his fanatical side when he realized he was loosing to, Peace Corps??? He started to get really intense and the rest of his team had to keep telling him to calm down. That this game wasn’t really that big a deal. Let me just say, I can understand where he’s coming from. If I was this big scary drug enforcer and some little peace corps volunteer kept blocking all my manly hard hits, I would be embarrassed too. That’s right, I stuffed that guy like a thanksgiving turkey 4 times! And if felt good. In all fairness, he had some great blocks against me too. But come on, he’s got 6 inches on my plus he’s a genetically engineered super human.

We ended up winning the 3rd game too, therefore winning the match and advancing to the next round. Players and spectators alike, we were all so proud of our underdog victory. I never got a sub the whole game and could feel my legs starting to buckle underneath me as the adrenaline was wearing off. In a way, I almost wished we had lost so we wouldn’t have to play another game that day. Luckily, after watching the USAID (USA International Development) play against the MOA (Military Operations A….. to be honest, I really don’t remember. Why does the US government insist on so many acronyms?). We won our second game on a forfeit as the Embassy Custodial staff didn’t have enough people to man a team. I was so relieved. Even though the all Peruvian team sounded like they could have been easy to beat in volleyball, they dominate the soccer tournament. And if I had had to play another match, I might have had to be carried out on stretcher. But both my Peace Corps doctors had turned up to cheer us on too, so I knew I was in good hands at least.

I had such an amazing experience and I’m so excited out team advanced and I get to come back next week and do it all over again. Next week though, I have 15 miles to run. But I’ll be sure to schedule it for after the tournament or the next day.

The day was so much fun. It was the first time I had even been inside the walls of the fortress we call he US Embassy. I was so proud to be a part of Team Peace Corps. We are so different from every other branch of the US foreign service and it shows even in things like a volleyball tournament. To us, love and support, a positive attitude, and working together are the ways we choose to confront a challenge. Not by sheer brawn and force. The moral of the story is, at first it seemed the power and muscle would over take the scrappy foreigners and volunteers, but in the end, what finally won out was love and Peace Corps.